Nutritional Services is working with vendors to provide food and educational opportunities from local food producers and farmers to reduce the impact CPS has on the environment and to educate students about where their food comes from.

The assertion that local food is superior for environmental reasons comes up often in local food debates. To understand why districts should not conflate local food with environmentally friendly food, I recommend reading Caitlin Hartsell’s excellent post about why growing food closer to consumers is not always better.

In addition to in his claim that local food is better for the environment, the candidate says that purchasing food locally will teach students where their food comes from. I don’t know how he expects the food to do that. From the students’ point of view, food from Missouri looks the same as food from Illinois or food from Indiana. Of course, teachers could point out to students where the food originated from, and they could conduct lessons on where the food was cultivated and harvested — but they could do that just as well if the food came from a different state. In fact, if the place where cafeteria food is grown is to become a subject of study, it might be better to buy food from a distance. That way, students can learn about a place with which they wouldn’t otherwise become familiar, instead of focusing their local area, which they already know something about from experience.

The post Columbia Board of Education Candidates Discuss Cafeteria Food appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

[T]his could be seen as a historical turning point in the American consciousness about actually having awareness about where food comes from and what goes into how it gets made.

Most advocates for calorie count mandates emphasize the effect they could have on the population’s health. They say that if people read caloric data whenever they order food, they’ll make healthier choices and put less of a strain on the health care system.

The Huffington Post essay is unusual in that it connects calorie counts to the local food movement. At first glance, this seems puzzling, because a calorie count tells you nothing about where your food comes from. Furthermore, a dish that was served up from scratch in your home town might be high in calories, while produce flown in from hundreds of miles away could contain fewer calories. Supposing consumers pay attention to the calorie counts and consequently reduce the calories they consume — there’s evidence that they don’t, but supposing they do — the effect could be to discourage some people from eating local food. For example, think of people who live next to a cattle farm and have access to local hamburgers, but can’t buy vegetables unless they’re shipped in.

However, the Huffington Post writer may be on to something. Once people are comfortable with calorie counts on the menu board of every major chain restaurant, they’ll be less likely to object new national labeling mandates. They’ll take it for granted that the federal government tells restaurants what to write on menus. Proposals to label food as “local” or “organic” will then meet with less opposition.

The post First Calorie Counts, Next Local Food Labels? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

They aren’t asking for subsidies for their enterprise, and they don’t insist on free public land. They aren’t lobbying the state to impose their preferences on anyone else, either. While they would like more people to agree with them, they go about convincing people without coercion. They show their neighbors the benefits of their lifestyle — no local food mandates or preferential policies are involved.

Anyone who lives in an area that allows chickens can try this approach.

The post I Applaud These Locavores’ Efforts appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“It’s really a conundrum,” says Sibella Kraus, president of nonprofit Sustainable Agriculture Education, or SAGE, which encourages sustainable local farming. “There is this demand for local, but we’re not really investing in local.” Ms. Kraus, known for her work planning the San Francisco Ferry Building market, says that while development is at a lull now due to the real-estate downturn, government at the state and local level hasn’t created enough incentives to prevent farmland loss when economic activity rebounds.

It’s worth noting that the advocates quoted here are not fighting for environmentally sound agriculture, or for forging relationships with farmers, or for supporting small farms. All those things could be done at a distance. They want the farming to take place at close geographical proximity; they think minimizing the physical space between grower and consumer is what matters. If what they really cared about were the environment or small farms, they would drop their demands for farmland in San Francisco — where it makes no sense economically — and instead support those practices where farmland is affordable. Which is more sustainable: farming in a rural area where land values are stable and crops pay for themselves, or farming next to a big city where the high price of land means the enterprise would fail without subsidies?

So, advocates should abandon the idea that “local” is a code word for “sustainable” or “better.” It isn’t. It just means “close by.” If you look around and see that the farmers near you are environmentally responsible, you can’t conclude that farmers everywhere are equally responsible. And those other farmers are local from the point of view of their neighbors. Every destructive, unsound farming practice is local to the people who live near it.

When cities or state grant subsidies to local agriculture — and in every policy I’ve seen proposed, “local” is defined in terms of a geographical area — they can’t be sure that those subsidies will go to the good local farmers and not the bad local farmers. Even if all the farmers who currently work in that region are all virtuous, there’s no guarantee that an unscrupulous farmer from somewhere else won’t move in to become local and claim the subsidy.

To those who argue for such subsidies in Missouri, I say: Not in my backyard!

The post When Advocates for Subsidies Say “Local,” They Mean “A Short Distance Away” appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Perhaps their parents are more enthusiastic? From the program coordinator’s description, I don’t think so. She suggests that parents, too, require a lot of education. When asked whether parents are learning about local food, she responds:

Not as much as they could be or should be. […] They need to go to school lunch and share it with their kids […] And then parents and caregivers, if they could purchase, serve and talk about Oregon foods with their family, phenomenal.

She would love it if parents could do those things, meaning that they aren’t doing them already. The parents have to be won over. It’s a far cry from, “They are educating me with their phone calls and petitions begging for more local food” — the reply I would expect if local food preferences really were implemented at the behest of parents.

I don’t blame Oregonians for their indifference. After all, as the program coordinator correctly states, local foods are not necessarily healthier than foods from other places. Parents might be more supportive if schools focused on procuring nutritional meals, without regard to locality.

One policy I especially hope Oregon will abandon is the preference that the program coordinator affirms for canned and frozen foods from local sources. Local canned and frozen foods have no nutritional advantage over canned and frozen foods from far away; you can’t argue that one is fresher than the other.

The post Oregonians Fail to Rally Around Local Food Preferences appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“I think it’s really good because we get healthier here than at my old school, and we get more fruits and vegetables and local meat,” says fourth grader Morgan Jones.

The district bought meat from a local farmer, spending an additional $1 per pound above the price it would normally pay.

As Farm to School expands to include products like meat or cheese, it gets harder for supporters to justify the program as anything but protectionism. The appeal of local fruits and vegetables is easier to relate to. Anyone’s who’s eaten delicious fruit right off the tree can sympathize with activists’ support for local produce. (At least, we can sympathize in the early fall and late spring. Activists still have to explain how local produce is superior during the rest of the school year, when very few fruits or vegetables are harvested. Many will say to preserve the local food in the fall — but is locally preserved food really better than food that was preserved somewhere else, or shipped in fresh?)

Meat, on the other hand, has no local advantage at any time of year. There’s no such thing as a hamburger picked fresh off the cow. Meat has to be preserved and prepared no matter where it comes from. Its quality depends on factors like the health of the animals and how safely the meat was handled.

It would be great if Missouri districts could resist this Farm to School trend and refrain from insisting on local meat. Districts should shop around for the safest meat at the best price — and not settle for whatever meat happens to be raised nearby.

The post Schools Tell Kids That Local Hamburgers Are Best appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Agricultural subsidies are harmful, no doubt about it. But is there a way to mitigate them? Activists say yes. They contend that new laws would counter the subsidies’ damage. To open the agricultural sector to competition, activists suggest — among other ideas — enacting preferential food policies that require school districts to purchase a set percentage of their cafeteria food from local sources. This, it is argued, would take power away from the corporations and undo some of the subsidies’ bad effects.

As much as I oppose subsidizing corporate agriculture, I can’t support the local food mandates. Ordering schools to buy local food is a poor antidote to corporate subsidies, for these reasons:

• There’s nothing to stop corporations from farming near school districts and touting their produce as “local.” Remember, a farm doesn’t have to be small or unsubsidized to count as local; it only has to be nearby. Just as agricultural corporations have stepped up to claim a large share of direct payments and other kinds of farm aid, they’ll also be eager to sell local food — at a premium, because districts won’t have the option to walk away from the sale and buy from businesses located farther away instead.
• Preferential treatment for local farmers could cause as much environmental damage as traditional subsidies. It would lure farmers to grow food near school districts, whether or not the land is suitable for crops. A district’s closest farmer might not always be the most responsible with pesticides and fertilizers. Even if you look around and see that your local farmers are environmentally conscious today, the situation might change when new businesses move in to be near a school district and have a guaranteed customer.
• Local food mandates place an unfair burden on school districts. District administrators didn’t engineer the mess in the agricultural sector, and fixing it shouldn’t be their job, either. They should be free to focus on their main goal — educating children. Let’s not take money that could go toward teachers’ salaries or building repairs and instead use it to pay a higher price for local food, when healthy food is available at a lesser expense from somewhere else.

Local food mandates, by guaranteeing customers for some farmers through public school policy, are themselves a form of subsidy. Neither the market nor the environment will be well served by adding yet another subsidy to the already over-subsidized farming sector. The real solution is to end government aid for agriculture. When farmers are free to compete on their own merits rather than on their political influence, we may see the market change in favor of farmers who were previously overlooked — including, possibly, farmers near your home or school.

The post Two Subsidies Don’t Make a Free Market appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Bailey was quoted suggesting that urban chickens undermine local economies, saying, “We have a lot of small farmers around here making chickens and eggs available for sale. My fundamental question is: Why aren’t we supporting the regional economy?”

Here is the op-ed’s excellent response:

I would argue that urban chickens would in fact strengthen Iowa’s economy, especially when we consider unique and important businesses such as the McMurry Hatchery in Webster City, known nationally for its collection of rare chicken breeds. Likewise, I highly doubt Bailey would make such an argument when considering whether citizens ought to be allowed to have vegetable gardens.

City residents are also part of the economy, and they shouldn’t have to pass up opportunities to create value for themselves in order to protect people who are already farming. Transactions in which money changes hands aren’t the only economic activity that matters.

In fact, the freedom to raise your own chickens is an important check on the farmers’ power. When customers can build their own chicken coops, farmers aren’t able to overcharge them for eggs or sell lower-quality eggs than what the market demands. If farmers don’t offer acceptable price and quality, customers will walk away and raise chickens themselves.

The post Know Your Farmer, Know Your Chicken appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Indiana school districts are lagging behind the rest of the country in procuring locally grown fruits and vegetables for students.

It turns out that buying local food just isn’t practical for Indiana districts:

“I don’t know what local farmers could grow that could last through a school year, but it would be nice if they could,” said Joanne Baierwalter, food service director for Muncie schools. “Potatoes, maybe, but where would you store them? Who would deliver them?”

Some local food advocates would respond that districts should buy up every local produce item when it’s harvested, then carefully preserve it to serve when school is in session. I’m left wondering: When did districts get out of the business of educating kids in order to become canneries?

The post Serving Local Food Is a Daunting Task for School Districts appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

It is also the start of a national conversation about the importance of understanding where your food comes from and how it gets to your plate. Today, there is too much distance between the average American and their farmer and we are marshalling resources from across USDA to help create the link between local production and local consumption.

The USDA’s program relies on the premise that local production is a social and environmental good that should be encouraged by the government. Blake Hurst, the author of the Weekly Standard article, debunks the idea that local is necessarily more “carbon neutral.” He cites a study by Hiroko Shimizu and Pierre Desrochers for the Property and Environment Research Center about “food miles.” The study’s abstract includes this conclusion (emphasis added):

The evidence presented suggests that food miles are, at best, a marketing fad that frequently and severely distorts the environmental impacts of agricultural production. At worst, food miles constitute a dangerous distraction from the very real and serious issues that affect energy consumption and the environmental impact of modern food production and the affordability of food.

Certain climates and types of land are better suited for particular agricultural purposes. The local-food movement trumpets locality and proximity above all else, though, ignoring the enormous energy inputs required to grow food on land that is not well-suited for that purpose. An assessment of the environmental impact of food growing needs to take into account all of the inputs — not just the distance traveled from the farm to the store.

The USDA has created its own matrix for evaluating the most important environmental factor for farms — proximity — without taking into account other criteria that could also have significant environmental impact. If an individual thinks it is important to buy locally, that is fine. But that decision should be made by the individual, without the help of a massive advertising campaign by a governmental agency that expends large sums of taxpayer dollars in order to promote their particular environmental model.

(This discussion is related to my recent post about farmers’ markets, and to Sarah Brodsky’s blog posts about local food.)

Another problem, in addition to USDA program’s misguided focus on buying local, are the implications that local food is somehow healthier. Fruit grown in Missouri is not any more nutritious than fruit grown in California or Florida, yet the USDA program seems to conflate the idea with statements like, “USDA wants to expand access to local, nutritious foods,” implying that proximity could contribute to nutritional value. Local food may not even be as fresh as food transported from other locales; in fact, the PERC study found that because larger farms ship much more frequently than small farms, their food is often more likely to be fresh when it reaches market. The USDA’s misleading claims about the purported environmental and health benefits of local food makes its program even more questionable, beyond the way in which it exerts influence on consumer choices.

Buying local food is not always the best way to be environmentally or health-conscious. At any rate, it is not the government’s job to influence consumer behavior, and the $65 million used by the USDA in its program to promote local food surely has a better use.

The post Buying Local Not Always Environmentally Friendly appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The urban farmer seemed out of place, because he made little effort to connect his locavore ideology to the problem of childhood weight gain. Of course, children will be healthier if they eat lots of fruits and vegetables, but there’s no reason those fruits and vegetables have to be grown in their cities instead of, say, shipped in from a field in California. The farmer railed against buying food from foreign countries — which, again, is no reason to avoid food from California, even if you accept his protectionist premise. Then he concluded with a few more off-topic pronouncements, including, “When farmers are in business, schools are out,” which sounds to me like an argument against relying on local food for children’s nutrition, and a recommendation that cities grow food in vacant buildings. (Not vacant lots, vacant buildings.)

The mayor of Hernando, Miss., offered more relevant comments, although he too gave the obligatory nods to farmers’ markets and urban gardens. He had a lot of ideas about things cities can do to invite physical activity, such as repairing sidewalks and building playgrounds. The mayor’s emphasis on local policies rather than federal mandates was refreshing. (You see, I have local biases of my own.) And I appreciated it when he said that government should not tell people to be healthy because “that’s a private decision.”

The mayor of Somerville, Mass., advocated a more invasive approach for government. His “Shape Up” campaign goes so far as to place a public stamp of approval on certain menu items at restaurants. Even more troubling is the mayor’s declaration, “The healthy choice must be the easy choice.” This recalls the attitude expressed by a student in Clayton when she spoke in support of the proposed smoking ban: If a choice is good, the city should ensure that it is also easy and fun. In other words, you shouldn’t have to make any sacrifices or be at all inconvenienced when you do the right thing — not if the government can help it. Take that way of thinking just a tiny step further, and the government will be making your choices for you.

While most of the speakers had creative plans for cities and schools, none of them explained why the federal government should play a role or why change couldn’t come from the ground up. The first lady emphasized that her campaign won’t try to impose Washington’s vision on everyone, but it’s hard to believe that when she says she’d like to turn convenience stores into produce markets.

The post “Let’s Move” appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Since its launch last summer, the cartoonish simulation game […] has become a Facebook phenomenon, luring in everyone from urbanites […] to actual farmers while gently nudging people to think more about where their food comes from.

I applaud FarmVille for disseminating knowledge about the origins of food without help from preferential local food laws. Advocates of farm-to-school programs and gardening subsidies cite learning about food as one of the main benefits of those policies. It’s good to see that a voluntary activity like playing FarmVille can be just as educational — at no cost to taxpayers.

The post Know Your FarmVille Farmer appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

With the grant, the Health Council will work toward increasing the availability of fresh, locally grown produce and to help transform the eating habits of the community.

There are two things wrong with the Health Council’s plan. First, there’s the assumption that the government ought to transform an entire community’s eating habits. It’s one thing to say that if a public institution like a school district happens to serve lunch to kids, the food might as well be nutritious. It’s altogether different to set out to engineer a lifestyle change for all of a city’s residents.

The Health Council points to the obesity “epidemic” to justify its plan, but obesity isn’t some kind of contagious disease that the state needs to protect us from. You won’t gain weight from coming into contact with an obese person. While the government might have to take action to prevent the spread of a virus or bacteria, it should leave the choices that can result in obesity up to individuals. They won’t put anyone else in danger if they gain weight.

Second, this is another instance of the government endorsing the idea that locally grown produce is superior to food from other sources. Anyone is free to hold this conviction; however, their belief has no place in policy until they come up with evidence for it. Supporters haven’t demonstrated a connection between local food and health. In fact, some dietitians even recommend frozen produce over fresh:

“[F]rozen produce actually can be healthier than the fresh variety. It is on the plant or tree longer than the fresh variety, so it’s packed with a higher nutrient value.”

If a public school near you is giving preference to food grown nearby, watch out. Your government might begin advocating local food as the correct choice for you, too.

The post Local Food Policy Branches Out appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

There will be more children home-schooled. […] Sports are going to be very big this year […] In the youth community, the younger people will be brought together by playing sports […]

Homeschooling has been steadily growing in popularity for years, so we can expect that trend to continue unless something out of the ordinary occurs. And kids will play sports in 2010? I could have told them that.

Another psychic weighs in on agriculture and the locavore movement, a topic I wrote about several times during 2009:

I see locally grown crops. I think people will band together and raise more local food.

I, too, see local food growth in the next year, especially in Springfield, Columbia, Kansas City, and other places where people have been interested in it — and lobbying for policies that would favor it — for a while now.

And there’s another prediction about kids and education, this time from a “spiritual adviser”:

I see a big change coming with schools and education. I see something major with education. I don’t know what that is.

It isn’t exactly precise, but you can’t expect anything more detailed from a quote that was given for free. If you want to know what changes are brewing in education, you’d probably have to pay a psychic for their expertise. Or just be patient and keep reading Show-Me Daily.

The post I Could Be a Psychic appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

But the district is learning that buying local is easier said than done:

One hurdle is finding the local produce to feed 10,000 or more children per day. The demand for local produce continues to grow, but local suppliers are too few for large institutions such as schools, Fullum learned.

Too many farmers in “Missouri are growing hay, wheat and soybeans. We don’t use that in our kitchens. We need spinach. Farmers have to change that. Our farmers are just now getting the idea that maybe our schools and our university are potential customers and maybe we should do more specialized farming,” she said.

It looks like the district is allowing the locavore philosophy to distract it from its goal of serving healthy food. Local produce is not the only alternative to canned or processed food. For example, fresh oranges are nutritious, and they don’t have any added salt, sugar, or preservatives. But they’re shipped in from warmer climates, so locavores overlook them.

The district should seek out healthy products to serve at lunch, regardless of where they come from. Restricting itself to food grown in Missouri could limit kids’ diets, besides burdening taxpayers. (Even if it gets a grant from the Department of Agriculture, the money had to come from taxpayers at some point.) And it’s unrealistic to expect demand from schools to change Missouri’s agricultural output, which is at least partially determined by factors like climate and soil quality that are outside of Columbia Public Schools’ control.

If some parents care about where the food comes from as much as how healthy it is, that’s their choice. They can buy food at a farmers’ market themselves — and send it to school with their kids in a lunch bag.

The post Local Food in Columbia Public Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Most of the values the locavore movement claims to embrace–healthier food, environmentalism, good treatment of labor–actually have little to do with whether or not a producer is located in one’s own ZIP code. So why not just tackle the issues themselves, rather than using localism as a proxy?

And the next question is also relevant to the more general debate between free trade and protectionism:

Why this parochialism that only seeks prosperity for those in my immediate midst?

The post More on Local Food appeared first on Show-Me Institute.